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Studies in the Novel, Volume 40, number 4 (Winter 2008). Copyright 2008 by the
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and the uncanny to critique both the idea that identity can be wholly unified
and, at the opposite extreme, the idea that identity is completely decentered.
As I will contend, the real problem Austers work confronts lies in creating
a mimetic reflection of a metaphysics that attempts to revivify Providence
without God, synchronicity without significance, and chance without chaos, all
while not alienating the critically sophisticated readers who largely compose
his audience.
Having no clear and stable referent in the novel, Leviathans title invites
speculation as to its relevance to the novels themes. Mark Osteen has explored
one aspect in his fine discussion of the paradigm of political and social
interconnectedness in Hobbess Leviathan (87-91), but the more conspicuous
referent seems so far unexplored. The Hebrew leviath, as Osteen points out,
means what is joined or tied together, and while this function certainly may
allude to the novels theme of the interrelatedness of human relations, the
Biblical meaning may suggest a far darker denotation.
The Biblical leviathan actually traces back to an earlier tradition. In
the fifteenth- to thirteenth-century BCE Canaanite Ugaritic texts that were
discovered in 1928, the god Baal defeats Lothan (ltn, a variant of Leviathan),
a primordial monster with seven heads. This motif of powerful god slays a
primeval beast transferred into the later Old Testament revision.2 Leviathan,
in fact, bookends the Bible, occurring early in Yahwehs declaring his
omnipotence to JobCanst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his
tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? (Job 41.1)and in Revelations
as the seven-headed beast that returns and is subsequently defeat at the end
of time: And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet.These
both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone (Revelations
19.20). As a metaphor, therefore, the leviathan suggests a cycle of arrival and
destruction that establishes a theme of repetition and the apparent impotence
of the Creator, who does not destroy the beast completely. By incorporating
these Biblical motifs, the novel uses the leviathan story to establish the theme
of characters dominated by patterns of repetition, playing and replaying the
traumas that structure their lives until their apocalyptic cessation.
Auster couples this thematic Biblical repetition with Freuds notion of
psychological repetition. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud offered his
fullest explication of the rather odd, yet apparently ubiquitous, phenomenon
of repetition compulsion, a psychiatric disorder marked by symptoms such
as recurrent ideas, ritualistic behavior, and impulses to perform acts that the
individual finds strange or abhorrent. The disorders etiology, according to
Freud, originates as a metaphoric or metonymic substitution of a disturbing
thought with another thought, action, or impulse. The new act or thought
redirects psychic tension and allows the individual a temporary reprieve
from the underlying anxiety. Freuds classic case study exploring repetition
compulsion investigated the Rat Man, a young man who replaced his own
PAUL AUSTER /
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murderous fantasies with suicidal ideation and fantasies of rats burrowing into
anuses. These recurring fantasies seemed radically other, as if arising from
outside the self, as the individual turned the impulse to destroy inward.
Freud later applies this psychic homeostatic theory to explain the
experience of the uncanny, a feeling of awe before that which reminds us of
something long forgotten:
[A]n involuntary return to the same situationalso results in the same
feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny.[I]t is only this factor
of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere
what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea of
something fateful and inescapable where otherwise we should have spoken
of chance only. (The Uncanny 144)
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selfhood and the various identities united under a unified subject. In such a
paradigm, the individual chooses which characteristics of the self he or she
will expose to the other, depending on context, thereby giving the illusion of a
multiplicity of distinct selves: identity as play.
Maria emerges not as a model of human behavior but as a person radically
determined through her relations with others. She wears revealing clothes to
affirm the reality of her body, to make heads turn, to prove to herself that she
still existed in the eyes of others (71), and she turns herself into an object,
a nameless figure of desire, and it was crucial to her that she understand
precisely what that object was (72). For Maria, roles are identity constructions
in relation to the other and compensate for a feeling of loss and the uncertainty
of subjectivity in relation to the self.
This problematic exploration of identity performance extends beyond
Maria as the novel obsessively meditates on the nature of roles for all of its
characters. The FBI men, Worthy and Harris, intimidate by being dressed for
their roles with such perfection (6) and could very well be switching roles
back and forth whenever they feel like it (7). Peter feels shame when he does
not live up to the responsibilities of fatherhood (59, 87). Several characters
misread romantic relationships as perfect by others when, according to Sachs,
We never know anything about anyone (107). The novel presents roles as
arbitrary and powerful unknowns, defined by an otherpeople, institutions, and
languageand governed by a damning, if unperceived, contingency.
As an artist, Marias projects reflect this concern with being-for-others
as a possible construction of an otherwise empty self. As arbitrary and
compartmental indulgences of her obsessions (69), her art seeks to totalize
existence within a framework tarnished with a desire for power and control
through reduction. Marias art projects, however, suggest that there is no
sufficient self in otherness. First, while working at a hotel, she attempts to
construct peoples lives out of the things in their rooms, an archeology of the
present (70). This fails. Second, after following a man to New Orleans on a
whim, she shadows his movements and creates a photodocumentary of his
life, constructing him out of a series of still fragments caught in time by the
others gaze (in the form of a camera). The essence that emerges from these
projects, however, does not reveal any identity at all, even for an other. Instead,
all she sees is a kind of nothingness, as though she had been taking pictures
of things that werent there. The camera was no longer an instrument that
recorded presences, it was a way of making the world disappear, a technique
for encountering the invisible (71). The novel does not imply that the real is
not there; rather, it implies that the focusing gaze of the other cannot alone
define subjectivity. In fact, it goes so far as to imply that the split between
the two ontological dimensions, being-for-itself and being-for-others, is an
inseparable gulf, radically alienating the individual by the others gaze.
PAUL AUSTER /
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connections between isolated facts, both of his own life and the world outside:
By gorging himself on those facts, he was able to read the world as though
it were a work of the imagination, turning documented events into literary
symbols, tropes that pointed to some dark, complex pattern embedded in the
real (27). In the same paragraph, Peter refers to Sachss language game as
both an obsession and a compulsion, hinting at Sachss blind necessity to
invent a reality without lacunae, a religion of totality and interconnectedness
that leaves no room for the uncertain. As we shall see, Sachss entire obsession
with conquering the unknown motivates his own cycle of repetition, differing
in cause and progress from Peters narrative trajectory.
Sachss need to pull events into a narrative whole seems congruent with
the novels intricate interconnection of symbols, tropes, and plot points. In fact,
several commentators have critiqued Auster for continually staging narrative
events more improbably than the most deterministic eighteenth-century novel.
Scenes unravel under an architectonic system so vast as to preclude any
possibility of free will or even mere probability: As chance would have it,
two of my closest friends lived in her building, and on several of my visits I
actually ran into her in the elevator or the downstairs lobby (47); Chance
had led her to [the book], but now that it was hers, she saw it as an instrument
of fate (74). As Eric Wirth notes, in Austers fiction, Chance is recognized
by its air of the inevitable (175). Peter offers an apology for this feeling of
inevitability within the context of his narrative: No matter how wild we think
our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the
real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now.
Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does (180).
While Auster defends against the charge that he structures his novels
according to improbable narrative logic, chance as a concept takes on a
centrality of focus beyond most others in his work. In fact, as early as City of
Glass (1985), the first volume of The New York Trilogy, the main character goes
so far as to claim that nothing was real except chance (3). Several critics have
followed Austers obsessive meditations on chance as in some way describing
a world governed by a kind of pure indeterminacy, contingency, and freedom.
Tim Woods, for example, argues that in Auster, as we first assume, Chance
disrupts the logic of causality, and it opens up the possibility of anything,
or indeterminacy (146). The further we get into Austers works, however,
the more we see that chance does nothing more than close off options. The
title of one of Austers novels from 1990, The Music of Chance, underscores
this aspect, hinting at the very orchestrated nature of music, which does not
generate itself.
Yet as Pascal Bruckner points out, the novels never clearly express the
Wizard of Oz behind all these machinations (29). Why the novels avoid
being straightforward in their implications is never quite clear. To the end,
Austers novels seem deeply invested in a deity that dare not say His name,
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while constantly trying to explain this cosmic control as nothing more than
a mathematical hypothesis. As Auster defended himself to McCaffery and
Gregory: Chance? Destiny? Or simple mathematics, an example of probability
theory at work? It doesnt matter what you call it. Life is full of such events.
And yet there are critics who would fault a writer for using that episode in a
novel (Art 290). This is a nice try, but there are few people outside of a handful
of Greek philosophers who would equate destiny with probability theory.
What Auster seems to reject is the idea of chance as an authorial power,
which would reduce Aristotelian narrative probability. He does not reject
chance as a power of a nameless architect of fate, which creates actual
probability. Meaningful coincidence that simply happens relates more closely
to Jungs idea of synchronicity than to philosophical contingency. In fact, one
of Austers essays, Why Write? seems predicated upon the idea that writing
emerges from the desire to dramatize fortuitous happeningsevents that seem
unfortunate yet end up helpful in the long run. The essay consists of a series
of vignettes dramatizing people being contacted by long-lost friends they had
just thought about even though they had not thought about them for years. Why
write? Because kooky coincidences happen all the time.
Even in The New York Trilogy, chance and accidental events are clearly
determinate in some other system. During one of the key epistemological set
pieces, for example, Quinn tracks the elder Stillman at Grand Central but thinks
that he sees two men who could be his target. Panicking, Quinn starts to think
of his situation in terms that apparently reflect a worldview of indeterminacy:
Whatever choice he madeand he had to make a choicewould be arbitrary,
a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end (68). For
critics like William G. Little, this perfectly confirms the kind of reading that
suggests that the identities of the two potential Stillmans are interchangeable:
Confronted with this radical cleft at the origin, Quinn has (nothing other than)
nothing to go on ....The detective, or the writer, is bound to miss the mark.
(158) As I have argued elsewhere, the point of this scene is that he does not
miss the mark. Quinn picks one of the Stillmans at random, and the novel later
validates that he was the correct target. (See Dimovitz 618-19.) By opening
himself up to contingency, an Austerian character inevitably loops back into a
system of correspondences that will take the character where he needed to go.
Yet who determined this need?
Austers work suggests a transcendent structure, a series of correspondences
that will undermine pure philosophical contingency and give meaning to an
otherwise meaningless existence. Yet the works refuse to name it as such.
Strangely, this refusal depends on the audience. In his book of radio essays
that he collected for NPR, I Thought My Father Was God (2001), Auster goes
so far as to lay out his requirements in terms that leave no uncertainty as to
his meaning: What interested me most, I said, were stories that defied our
expectations about the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and
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hidden forces at work in our lives, in our family histories, in our minds and
bodies, in our souls. In other words, true stories that sounded like fiction (xvxvi). He goes on to convince us that more often than not, our lives resemble
the stuff of eighteenth-century novels (xviii), a comment that recalls his
defensive claim to McCaffery and Gregory that when he said coincidence, he
did not mean a desire to manipulate, for there was a good deal of that in
bad eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction (Art 288). Clearly in the time
between his interview with McCaffery and Gregory in 1989-90 and I Thought
My Father Was God in 2001, Auster no longer felt a need to apologize for the
metaphysics of chance, which is not the metaphysics of indeterminacy. At the
time of Leviathans publication, however, postmodern critical theory was in its
heyday, and Auster seemed to be aware that such a worldview might alienate
his core audience.
Austers obsession with chance and repetition crystallizes around
several key clusters of images and symbols. One of these clusters includes
the conceptual equation between three consistently repeated terms: chance,
accident, and falling. These terms are related in their derivations. Chance
developed from the Latin cadere, to fall, and it traces back to Epicurus,
who added to Democrituss notion that atoms fell straight toward the earth in
a uniform pattern the idea that there were microscopic variations that could
not be accounted for by anank, necessity. This sense of chance as falling
also informs another derivation of cadere, accidere, to happen, which
metaphorically served as the root of our term accident. As Gerard de Cortanze
points out, Auster clearly believes in the power of the accident (Le Monde
18-25), and I would suggest that his understanding of accident intertwines
with his other central conceptsrepetition, uncanny, chance, and fallingall of
which are integral to the novels worldview. In Austers work, falling always
connotes both a physical accident and the Fall of Man. Characters constantly
fall or have apparently random events happen to themevents that, were it not
for Austers repeated refusal, would seem to be predetermined by some fate.
In 2002s Book of Illusions, for example, Dolores Saint John accidentally
(138) shoots Brigid OFallon, which leads to Hectors fall and need for
redemption. In Leviathan, Auster tropes the central narrative act of Sachss fall
as the final understanding of a motivating power that exists both outside and
inside the self.
While chance operates as a metaphysical postulate throughout Austers
work, the narratives themselves problematize Austers stated intent. In
Leviathan, especially, characters only establish fortuitous circumstance
cycles a posteriori as part of the unifying retroactive narrative reconstruction.
The projection of meaning onto chance occurrences is another method of
mythologizing personal experience into a logical event sequence. This leads
to an uncanny feeling when thinking about the experience. As Auster himself
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For the Auster of The Invention of Solitude, therefore, each of these concepts
become linked: the uncanny, home, unhomeness, coincidence, childhood
memory. Coincidences are not only the chance occurrences composed by some
unknown and unnamed god, but they are also the unconscious reactivation of
a childhood structure of the mindan infantile reenactment in contemporary
consciousness. Once the recognition of an earlier memory repetition occurs,
the uncanny opens to an intuition of the void, the sublime, that which is beyond
willful causality. On the third page of the novel, Peter relates his feeling that
Sachs would blow himself up one day: It was no more than a wild intuition
at that point, one of those insane leaps into the void, and yet once the thought
entered my head, I couldnt get rid of it (3; emphasis added). Peters equation
of the uncanny with the same structural movement of Sachss fall will become
increasingly important as the narrative unfolds.
The themes that directly relate to uncanny experience constellate around
a series of negative metaphors and images: the void, the lack, nothingness,
intuition, mystery, death, Zen Buddhism, and female genitals. Each of these
figures plays out in Benjamin Sachss unfolding narrative. Sachss story is a
story of recurrence and the attempt to find an escape from psychic repetition
cycles. His wife, Fanny, foreshadows the meaning of Sachss death while
talking with Peter:
I remember thinking that you must have been a very serious person. One of
those young men who was either going to kill himself or change the world.
So far, I havent done either. I guess that means Ive given up my old
ambitions.
And a good thing, too. You dont want to get stuck in the past. (51-2)
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quite the conscious master of his own psyche. He tells Peter a month after the
accident: It wasnt a question of being unfaithful to Fanny, it was a question
of self-knowledge. I found it appalling to discover that I was capable of
tricking myself like that (128). As Maria grasps him, he feels something that
resembled happinessa microscopic shudder, a surge of transitory bliss (130).
As Peter describes, it was not the fact of his desire, but the denial of that desire
as a duplicitous means of fulfilling it (129).
Sachs does not link this desire specifically to a desire for Maria, qua Maria,
but for Maria as a trope for the maternal function. She is still nameless at that
moment for Sachs, their entire repartee predicated upon Sachss forgetting her
name. She thereby exists for Sachs as a nameless object of desire, a projected
fantasy of the female as non-linguistic embodiment of the real. His desire springs
from fantasies of Marias pubic hair and buttocks as an Eden (a metaphor
for primordial innocence before the fall)a thought that he obsessively repeats,
a projector rolling in his head, and Sachs was powerless to turn it off
(127).
As Sachs falls, he feels that his center of gravity heaved upward (130),
and this decentering becomes in his mind a trope for decentering his locus
of control: If I could be caught by surprise like that, it must mean theres
something fundamentally wrong with me. It must mean that I dont believe
in my life anymore (136). Free will links in Sachss mind with life, and
the fact that he perceives himself as dead in the air annihilates his belief in
freedom. As he lies in the hospital, the power of words no longer a direct
mode of expression, he embraces his silence as a mode of repeating his fall:
To be silent was to enclose himself in contemplation, to relive the moments
of his fall again and again, as if he could suspend himself in midair for the
rest of timeforever just two inches off the ground, forever waiting for the
apocalypse of the last moment (134; emphasis added). Here is the moment of
Leviathans apocalypse, yet it is described in terms of a repetition compulsion.
By identifying himself with his own pathology, Sachs identifies his freedom
as a delusion, his subjectivity as merely an epiphenomenon of component
environmental inputs.
This epiphany of sorts leads Sachs into his next narrative phase in which
he tries to locate his identity in the other who seems to have determined his
fall. His meetings with Maria, during which she photographs him in the same
nullification process she found her art producing before, are an attempt, as
Maria describes, at an objectification of inner states. He understood that all my
pieces were stories, and even if they were true stories, they were also invented.
Or even if they were invented, they were also true (143). This objectification,
however, also provides a distance between subject and affect, between
experiencing the inner state and experiencing the inner states as something
other. Every portrait in absentia that Maria had produced earlier subverts
Peters assessment that Sachss soul was gradually given back to him (145).
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This remarkable passage lays bare all the themes that I have discussed. Sachss
choice to define himself through the symbolic act of destroying replicas of
the statue that defines him will unify his subjectivity, closing the gaps of his
existence, allowing him to escape the bewitching aspect of the phallic mother,
and giving himself freedom by commitment to a toothless terrorism. And yet
his desire is doomed to failure. Sachss attempt was yet another blind leap
into the unknown (199), and he finds himself caught in the same repetition.
Establishing his identity in opposition to that which structures him is merely
the other half of identifying with the structure. By enclosing himself within a
cycle of repetition, Sachs will indeed begin all over again.
By becoming the Phantom of Liberty in opposition to Fanny as the
phantom of secret desire (51), Sachs becomes the portrait in absentia of
Marias photodocumentaries, a mere conglomerate of identities that are not
he, as the multitude of false identifications in his wallet signifies (2). It is no
surprise, therefore, that Sachs literally fragments himself by the bombs of his
own design, a subversion of Deleuze and Guattaris notion that the ideal model
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for describing subjectivity is the desiring machine, the fragmented body without
organs. The bomb explodes in Wisconsin, the state where Sachs met Fanny in
1965 during a peace march at the University of Wisconsin. Sachs ends his life
at another originary moment, a place long since lost in his compulsion to repeat
the instant of his determination. Finally, the novel reinforces the repetition
compulsion motif by the fact that Sachs was born on the day that the atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, yet he balances this by dying at the hands of
his own bomb.
In her thorough essay, Doubling, Intertextuality, and the Postmodern
Uncanny: Paul Austers New York Trilogy, Roberta Rubenstein has argued
that Austers use of Freuds The Uncanny added a postmodern twist to The
New York Trilogy, suggesting that the novel earns its postmodern credentials
because in the end irresolution replaces resolution (245). But if The New
York Trilogy can be read as exploring the notion of a postmodern uncanny,
then Leviathan represents a return of the modernist repressed. While Auster
uses the rhetoric and props of poststructuralist theory, what emerges in
Leviathan is a modernist exploration of the manifold dimensions of self. The
novel continually subverts the idea of subversion. Not that there is nothing but
stories; rather, all we have access to are stories that point toward a real that
more often than not eludes us. There is a reality to Leviathans phenomena;
the characters and the reader can simply never know with absolute certainty
what that reality is. The constant revisions of previous ideas about the known
serve to revise hypotheses, not destroy them. All of Peters reconstructions
are finally subverted by the efficiency of Harris, the older FBI detective, who,
based on scant evidence and a hunch, is able to reconstruct and confirm Sachss
identitya far more efficient reconstruction than all of Peters meanderings.
Thematically, Austers work constructs postmodern themes as an
unfortunate byproduct, not as a metaphysical primary. His work critiques
postmodern culture as one that denies a priori verities that are always already at
work and need no explanation. The central concept that drives Austers fiction
(and often nonfiction) is the notion of chance, an agentless agency that apparently
has the power to orchestrate the world according to an unknown score. When
he declares to McCaffery and Gregory that uncanny correspondences can be
reduced or equated to chance, destiny, simple mathematics, or probability
theory, he buries his more radically absolute worldview (destiny) within the
framework of more easily digestible hypotheses for the literati (probability
theory). The novels portray the controlling force of chance at operation in
everything. This leads to an interconnectedness between subjects, institutions,
and ideologies that denies the subject the possibility of free choice.
This view of the postmodern condition as a defect in our cultural
worldview is everywhere in Austers work. For example, Linda L. Fleck
asserts that Leviathan clearly links Sachss attributes with Austers portrait of
PAUL AUSTER /
463
NOTES
1
See especially Russell, whose relatively early article is the most exhaustive and compelling
reading of The New York Trilogy from an earnest poststructuralist paradigm. Like many articles
of its type, it quickly moves from an exercise in a variety of readings that is amenable to the
deconstructive principles of Jacques Derrida (71) to one that claims Derridean priority over
the text: City of Glass illustrates Derridean dissemination (75).
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However, some have argued that the Hebrew is the older story. See Emerton.
Lacan reads the repetition compulsion paradigm as reflecting an obsession with masking
the lack in the Otherin other words death, incompleteness of the symbolic order, castration, or
the contingency of existence (99).
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Interviews and The Red Notebook. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. 287-326.
. The Invention of Solitude. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
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